Page:The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany.djvu/122

94 growth continues in like proportion through another decade every other sect will be left behind in the race for numerical supremacy. The figures given out by the church itself have been ridiculed by the hostile as mere guesswork, but some of the evidence appears in the concrete and cannot be combated. “One cannot sneer away the two-million-dollar stone edifice or the thirty thousand worshippers who entered its portals Sunday,” says the Springfield Republican. Neither can we overlook the steady, consistent growth of the sect in every community in which it has found a foothold. In the adherence of its converts to the faith, and in the absence of dissent among them in the interpretation of its tenets, there is also much to convince the skeptic.

The remarkable growth and the apparent permanency of Christian Science were noted in the recent dedication in Boston of the magnificent new temple of the cult. When the doors were opened to the public, the structure was free from debt. While the dedicatory services were being held at different hours of the day, forty thousand Christian Scientists from every State in the Union and from many foreign countries were in attendance.

Although Mrs. Eddy, the Founder of Christian Science, was not in attendance, she sent greetings in which she declared that the “crowning ultimate” of the church “rises to a mental monument, a superstructure high above the work of men's hands, even the outcome of their hearts, giving to the material a spiritual significance — the speed, beauty, and achievements of goodness.”

But a few years ago, men there were who predicted that